Hebrew word · H4561
מֹסָר
uvemosaram
discipline
Discipline, correction, chastening, warning. It is the training a father gives a son or a teacher gives a pupil, which can include rebuke and physical punishment. Its root, yasar, means to discipline or correct.
Appears once in the Hebrew Old Testament. ·
What it means
discipline, correction
Another spelling of mu.sar (מוּסָר ": discipline" H4148)
Abridged from Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), via STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0).
In depth
- Range of meaning
Discipline, correction, chastening, warning. It is the training a father gives a son or a teacher gives a pupil, which can include rebuke and physical punishment. Its root, yasar, means to discipline or correct. The meaning moves between 'instruction' and 'chastisement', but the corrective idea is always there: musar puts someone right who is going wrong.
- Against the English
KJV, WEB and NASB have 'instruction', which today sounds like neutral teaching or information. BSB, ESV, NIV and NLT have 'warnings', which keeps the corrective idea but comes from a different underlying text (see textual notes).
- How it drifted
In 1611 'instruction' could carry the sense of training and correction. Modern English has narrowed it to directions or teaching content, which loses the note of rebuke and pain.
- Used elsewhere in the period
Proverbs uses the word constantly ('the musar of the LORD', Prov 3:11, paired with 'reproof'). Job 5:17: 'do not reject the musar of Shaddai', where it is Eliphaz's word for suffering as God's correction. Job 36:10: God 'opens their ear to musar'. The rare spelling mosar occurs only here. Some scholars connect it instead with moser, 'bond, fetter' (from 'asar, 'to bind'), as in Job 39:5 and Ps 2:3. That would give 'he seals their bonds', but this is a minority reading.
Where it appears
Job · 1
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Job 33:16 וּבְמֹ֖סָרָ֣ם and with discipline their
He opens their ears and terrifies them with warnings
Here: 'And on their correction.' This is a rare spelling of musar, a word for correction or discipline that warns and corrects, often painfully. 'Their' means the correction meant for them. The prefix be- marks what the seal is set on, just as in Job 37:7, 'on the hand of every man he sets a seal'.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.